Bad Reputation

Though the original the goal of reputation systems was to issue access tokens to control entry into the groups, they are double edged. Donald Trump proved that the negative of a negative was positive and used his media disapproval ratings as an access token to Red State voters. There is nothing to prevent other candidates from doing the same or stopping groups from flipping the Chinese government reputation index by taking the inverse of the state metric.

A bad rep can be a good rep, depending on who's looking.

That's true about Trump, anyway. The more the media hated him in 2016, the more some people loved him for defying them. It was a kind of credential: you could trust him because the people who despised you hated him too. Maybe that's not the best credential, but it's also not nothing.

1 comment:

Gringo
said...

As an example of how little some people listen to our media betters, consider the issue of newspaper endorsements of Trump. I once went to Wikipedia to look up newspaper endorsements of the 2016 candidates. I tallied up circulation figures for papers and candidates.Trump won endorsements of newspapers that accounted for about 3% of circulation.

It is rather hard to believe that a Presidential candidate would win with newspaper endorsements representing only 3% of circulation. Yet he won. Nearly half the electorate gave a big thumb-in-the-nose to the media.